Celebrating St. Crispin’s Day

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We need more literary holidays. Right now we have Bloomsday, and that’s about it. As great as Ulysses may be, we’re missing out on plenty of other books that lend themselves to an annual celebration. For what it’s worth, I want to claim today (October 25) for readers. A lot of people don’t know it, but today is already a holiday — St. Crispin’s Day. In theory, it’s meant to honor a Christian martyr named Crispin, but for me the day belongs to William Shakespeare and his play Henry V. The drama’s most memorable scene is the title character’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech, in which he rallies the British army to face off against a larger French force on the Feast of St. Crispin.

And there are lots of ways we can celebrate it. After all, the St. Crispin’s Day Speech is one of the best inspirational speeches in literature, and it was written by the most famous dramatist in the history of the English language. It practically demands to be read aloud. People could even perform it at home and post it on You Tube. As for myself, I am celebrating by simply reading the play — and thinking about the king at the center of it.

The St. Crispin’s Speech is not only great theater, it is Henry’s defining moment as a character. In it, he brushes aside concerns that his troops are outnumbered by declaring, “The fewer men, the greater share of honor” and insisting that anyone afraid to fight should leave because “We would not die in that man’s company/That fears his fellowship to die with us.” He slowly works these two threads — glory and fellowship — together throughout the address:

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.

Henry is playing on his men’s desire for acclaim, telling them that they will be seen as heroes back home, “Familiar in his mouth as household words.” He doesn’t stop there, however. The speech culminates not only with Henry’s most famous line, but also with his boldest promise:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…

Though it is a remarkable piece of rhetoric, inspiring his men to an unexpected victory at the Battle of Agincourt, the attentive reader or playgoer will notice that it is transparently untrue. After all, the play is called Henry V for a reason — because it is Henry, and Henry alone, who is remembered for the victory at Agincourt. The men that make up his “band of brothers” are almost all unnamed in the play and have been forgotten by history. They are fighting for Henry’s glory, not their own. Henry readily admits, “if it be a sin to covet honour,/I am the most offending soul alive.” His speech is a means to that end — he is rallying his troops because he needs them to make himself famous. He is lying to them even as he asks them to give up their lives on his behalf.

As W.B. Yeats observes, “(Henry) is as remorseless and undistinguished as some natural force, and the finest thing in his play is the way his old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on their way to the gallows.” Yeats is referring especially to the fate of Bardolph, Henry’s erstwhile friend who is executed by a British officer — with the king’s approval — over a petty theft. What’s most striking about the scene is his coldness about giving the order, saying, “We would have all such offenders so cut off.”

Henry’s treatment of his friends is revealing. Bardolph dies because Henry wants to maintain total discipline in his ranks. Friendship and mercy do not produce victories, so Henry discards them. In the two parts of Henry IV — a pair of earlier plays focused on Henry’s youth — Prince Hal (as he was then known) is a friendly, jovial man, often playing pranks on Bardolph and their mutual friend John Falstaff. Now he is calculating and cruel. In Henry V’s first act, we learn that Falstaff has died of grief after being cast aside by Henry as a political liability. This is especially poignant because in Henry IV, Part One, Falstaff sets himself up as Henry’s one connection to humanity, warning the prince, “banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”

What the execution of Bardolph illustrates is that Henry has indeed “banished all the world,” and done so willingly. He does not have a single conversation in the entire play that doesn’t further his ambitions; he has no friends, no emotional attachments of any kind. All this is done in the service of becoming a “great” man. By some measures, it works. His willingness to say anything to his subjects makes him a great manipulator of emotions, which in turn makes him an effective public speaker. His single-minded pursuit of glory makes him a brave soldier, willing to throw himself into battle alongside his troops if that’s what it takes to impress them. Most importantly, from Henry’s point of view, he is successful — not only conquering France but also seducing the nation’s princess, Katherine, which should ensure that his offspring would inherit the French throne. Henry is a winner, and as he points out in his battlefield address, history remembers winners.

But it is one thing to remember a man; it is another to honor him. The play subtly makes the case that winners aren’t necessarily worth honoring — that greatness is a paltry thing. The poet W. H. Auden says it best: “Hal has no self.” He is incapable of reflection; he wants and he acts and that is all. If to lodge himself in people’s memory, he needs to invade another country on flimsy pretexts, then he does it without a second thought. He will also execute a friend for a relatively minor offense to set an example. He will even promise a woman he has never seen before that he is in love with her in the hopes of adding another title to his own. By showing us the emptiness and selfishness underlying Henry’s noble words and brave deeds, the play warns us to be leery of great speeches, great men, and even great victories.

Henry’s triumph at Agincourt brings no benefit to the English nation. The whole reason his force is so small is because most of his troops are needed back home to prevent a split among the English nobles from turning into a full-fledged rebellion — a split that Henry makes no effort to heal. His friends either end up dead, like Falstaff and Bardolph, or disillusioned. And students of British history know that Henry’s son, Henry VI, will not be able to hold his father’s empire together, and that Henry’s heirs will never truly rule France. Though Henry is acclaimed as a hero at the play’s end, it’s clear the only beneficiary of his heroism is himself. He is a walking statue — emotionless, rigid, and of no practical value to anyone.

In Henry V, Shakespeare offers us an opportunity to see the horror that results from pursuing winning only for its own sake. This is why St. Crispin’s Day ought to belong to Shakespeare’s play, and not the historical Henry’s battle. Because by reading, rereading, or simply thinking about the play, we are reminded that there is often a difference between the achievements that usually get remembered and the achievements that actually make people’s lives better. In a sense, the best counterpoint to Henry is Shakespeare himself, who has managed to take a shallow, dishonest man and turn him into the subject of a profound, candid work of art. That’s the kind of accomplishment I want to celebrate.

My grandmother, the writer Han Suyin, died last November at ninety-six. The funeral was in Switzerland, and I went only because my mother asked me to. Twice. “You’ll be fine,” I said. “Just remember what an asshole she was.”

8 comments:

My sentiments exactly. Henry’s speech plays on the key reason that men will fight and die in battle. It’s not for King or country, but for the man standing next to you. Deep psychological inquiries reveal again and again that heroism is based in the care for that one standing next to you – not for ideology or goals or even fame. The key strain in Henry’s speech is “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” Shakespeare goes right to the point so well that it would have resonated with the “veterans” in the theater. It’s that line that brings tears to the eyes of the old warrior! Soldiers know right well that Henry is a deceiver – all kings are – but that’s not why they would plunge “into the breach” – it’s the love of their fellow soldiers. The speech moves us, not because of what Henry is, but because of the cord it strikes in every heart – the love of comrades! Yes, to St. Crispin’s Day!

I’m with you and all for retaining October 25th “St. Crispin’s Day”, but also additional Literary noteworthyness. I fell in love with the Crispin speech in reading Henry V and was exceptionally delighted to “see and hear” it again in the movie starring Danny DeVito when he was assigned to “teach” several Army recruits on base while dealing with a tough Officer-type supervisor who really had it in for the “dumb kids.” If you’ve seen the movie you might remember the name, but during a rainy, miserable, exercise bivouac one of the army recruits is challenged to recite some Army regs and then anything else that “motivated” him – the rain is pouring down; the kid is all suited up, parka, helmet, rifle and all, and from memory recites beautifully St. Crispin’s Day Speech word for word. At that point the whole arc of the movie changed – great!! fantastic!!

Pleased I am for the reminder I was given by a close friend of St. Crispin’s Day. I’ve been impressed with Shakespeare’s writing of he speech of Henry V for may years. It reminds me only in a different way of Chariots of Fire when the young Scott refused to run on the Sabbath and Isaiah 40:30 is quoted. Some pursue peaceful ends because of their greater power to inspire men to act nobly.

Yes the Battle of Agincort seems to have inspired Englishmen to care for one another in a situation that caught them as the underdogs. Yet, the inspiration of brotherhood has a strong appeal.

Agreed. However after a couple years’ more campaigning, the real Henry V was eventually able to fulfil his objectives. Via the Treaty of Troyes (1420) he was recognised by the French as the regent and heir to the French throne. This was furthered by his marriage to the very French, Catherine of Valois, the daughter of King Charles VI.

The question shouldn’t be whether or not getting an M.F.A. is a worthwhile for those privileged enough to agonize over the expenditure. Instead we should ask: how can we better support people who want to write?

1. Into the Tillmanverse
You never quite realize what Lynne Tillman’s done until it’s too late. She takes formal adventures in flavors of novels that had never before welcomed them. She carefully embeds details deep in her texts that others would dutifully (and dully) trot out up front. She crafts what feels like one distinctive, coherent fictional reality without explicitly connecting any of her long-form stories to one another. Published over two decades, her five novels so far build and explore what I call the “Tillmanverse” through the eyes and ears of worldly, culturally keen women (and one man), shapen or misshapen by their undeniable compulsions, obscure fixations, and grimly complex senses of humor.

The Tillmanverse now has one more extension in the form of Someday This Will Be Funny, a collection of short stories newly published by Red Lemonade. Their women (and occasional men) write copious communiqués, trust and distrust their memories, trust and distrust their imaginations, don’t quite reconnect with the cast of their past, see themselves in their relationships, move ahead at the behest of odd desires, and stake out patches of the cityscape all their own. What’s more, they do it in text that knows just what to tell and what to leave completely untold. Tillman tends to lay out her novels and stories in pieces, but with piece-curation skills like hers, who needs wholes?

Indeed, the latest book’s 22 tales showcase Tillman’s abilities in microcosm; what you find in them, you find in even greater depth and quantity in her novels. What better time, then, to take a look back at all her full-length novels to date? The more detailed your map of the Tillmanverse, the richer you’ll find your own wanderings through it.

2. Would you really call it agency?Haunted Houses, Tillman’s debut novel, braids the stories of three women growing up in and around New York. The epigraph “We are all haunted houses” seems to bode ill, as if predicting for the protagonists 208 pages of playing receptacle for assorted traumas. While none of the trio endure quite so rough a time as that, they nonetheless live apparently shapeless lives pocked by impulse, inertia, and confused frustration. They display flashes of agency, whether about the places they live, the books they read, or the fellows they let in, but the book’s overall form never stops asking whether agency is really what you’d call it.

Jane, constantly struggling with her weight, desperate to shed her virginity, and genuinely close only to her hokey, obese uncle Larry, ultimately loses that virginity to a dopey co-worker at Macy’s. The bookish Emily — “Why can’t you be more normal?” laments her mother — grows into a sloppy, lackadaisical culture vulture who attaches herself to English rockers and married Austrians. Grace, spooked in childhood by periodically tussles with her erratic mother and the sight of a blank-eyed farm boy tossing a bag of kittens off a bridge, drifts to Providence and becomes the spitefully reluctant muse of her gay, Oscar Wilde- and Marilyn Monroe-worshipping best friend Mark who stages plays at bars.

Tillman sketches the three childhoods in gritty enough detail to let you assume that, having established the wrongs foisted upon these ladies in youth — isolation, imagined frights never corrected, groundless disapproval, dead friends, freaky dads — she’ll proceed to deterministically follow the reverberations into three disappointing adulthoods. Yet she plays it just craftily enough to throw that interpretation into question while also avoiding the obvious move of getting these three together. From start to finish, Jane, Emily, and Grace remain united mainly by the late-mid-20th century in which they come of age and the geographical territory they do it in. Even when one breaks away, as when Emily takes a proofreading job in in Amsterdam, none shake their vague existential claustrophobia.

3. What we call personalityThe travel bug bites Motion Sickness’ unnamed American heroine harder, so much harder that she never stops traveling — indeed, barely pauses in any one place — rendering normal whatever “motion sickness” she suffers. This twitchy peripateticism offers Tillman the chance to structure the novel both in fragments and geographically: you read a shard of narrative in Paris, then one in Istanbul, then one in Agia Galini, then one in Amsterdam, then another in Istanbul, and so on. The protagonist’s financial support? A bit of savings and a small loan from Mom — no wandering aristocrat, she. Her cultural armory? Copies of The Interpretation of Dreams, The Quiet American, and My Gun is Quick, and a love of Chantal Akerman and Luis Buñuel.

Despite her intriguing taste in books and films and merciless drive toward perpetual flight, this woman reveals remarkably little about herself. Yes, we’ve all read narrators who do and say much while concealing even more, but Tillman somehow casts aside even our standard desire to get further into her interior. A swirl of secondary characters, almost all compulsive travelers with a tendency to turn up in several different nations, offers a distraction: our heroine helps an aged eccentric assemble her memoirs, signs on to a tour of aggressive sightseeing with a pair of English brothers, drinks with an ill-fated ex-cop, separately encounters a Buddhist American single mother and her runaway husband, and falls for a Yugoslavian who argues, with increasing strenuousness, for the melancholic weight of history that supposedly hunches all Europeans.

But does this supporting cast counterbalance the failure to probe of the narrator’s deeper character, or do the countless, always-developing nuances of her various relationships with them constitute her deeper character? Haunting cafés with one, momentarily shacking up in a rented room with another, writing postcards to many others but tearing most of them up — these actions, and nothing else, could prove enough to make a human being. “In a sociology course I took the professor said that what we call personality doesn’t exist except in relation to others,” Tillman, with an uncharacteristic explicitness, has her protagonist say toward the book’s end.

In Cast in Doubt, Tillman creates Horace, another traveler whose gender alone makes him feel at first like a stark departure. But his homosexuality emerges in the early chapters, either bringing him closer to or distancing him from his lady colleagues in the Tillman oeuvre. The relevant question: what do male homosexuality and female heterosexuality have in common — a lot, or nothing? If Horace doesn’t approach this issue directly, he at least takes on questions in its orbit when he develops a controlling aesthetic-intellectual infatuation with a girl who one day lands in his tiny Greek town.

Horace, you see, has long since gone expat. At 65, shacked up on Crete with a surly twentysomething local, he tosses off crime potboilers while avoiding work on a hazy magnum opus called Household Gods. When Helen — surely the most loaded possible name, given the Greek context — enters his life, his hypertrophied fictionalist’s mind builds around her a towering mystique. Though the objective details portray Helen as nothing more than a callow, flighty psychiatrist’s daughter with a loopy scrapbook in hand, Horace looks at her and practically gets vertigo. Needless to say, her disappearance, which comes as suddenly as her arrival, only intensifies his obsession.

Beneath Cast in Doubt’s stolidly un-flashy surface, Tillman uses Helen’s draw on Horace to perform a fascinating act of genre subversion. Horace funds his self-imposed exile by writing the surprisingly inventive yet still groan-inducing exploits of detective Stan Green, and Horace looks to Green as his model when he resolves to drive across the island in pursuit of his quasi-muse. But Tillman very nearly sets the issue of whereabouts entirely aside, focusing instead on who-abouts. Soon after dedicating himself to his investigation, Horace comes to realize how little he ever knew about Helen. This doesn’t stop him from speculating, sometimes wildly, which enriches the inevitable collision of his imagination and reality — reality coming in the form of that diary in which Helen scribbled so purposefully.

Parts of the book play as a detective tale; other parts play as a standard psychological narrative; most parts play as a genre less easy to pin down. Horace’s way with stories, the remote setting to which he relegates himself, the hodgepodge cast that surrounds him — a South African provocateur; a black New York “scenemaker”; a former opera star, a limp, cynical aesthete; a hirsute English hermit — and the reigned scowl underlying even his happier moments all remind me of David Markson’sGoing Down. What can we call this tiny genre? I suggest “oblique, vaguely menacing narratives of fictional complacent expatriate writers.” Barnes & Noble can start building that shelf any day now.

4. What every malcontent needsIf it weren’t for all the jokes, No Lease on Life would read as yet another story of crushing rent-controlled New York squalor. When Tillman writes squalor, she writes squalor: layer upon layer of grime; collapsed, immobile junkies; heaping piles of human waste; slashed bags of garbage; spreading pools of milk. And that’s just inside Elizabeth Hall’s building! In the first half of the book, Tillman recounts Elizabeth’s battles to nail down an apartment in New York, to fight a minute rent increase, to get her drunken superintendent to clean anything at all, to convince the guy across the street to quite revving his car so early in the morning — all in the course of one night.

Transfixed by the sweep of street chaos on her block, Elizabeth stares out the window instead of sleeping, fantasizing about taking up a crossbow to murder the “morons” and “crusties” vomiting and knocking over trashcans all night long. Tillman evokes an almost farcically shambolic New York familiar to anyone who enjoys the literature and film that came from the city in the seventies, but she sets this novel in 1994 — you can tell by the O.J. trial references — thus illustrating that the place didn’t go completely minty-fresh in the nineties. Or at least Elizabeth’s block — her world — didn’t.

When I talk about No Lease on Life’s “jokes,” I don’t necessarily mean that Tillman or Elizabeth, despite the grit-toothed resolve evident in the both of them, lighten these circumstances with the cynical wit every educated lowish-class urban malcontent needs. Besides the line between the book’s two days, which bear the titles “Night and Day” and “Day and Night”, only jokes break up the text. Common, punchline-y, sometimes tired, often sexual or racial jokes, none of which, miraculously, have an explicit relationship to the narrative. I happened to laugh the loudest at this one, which also bears an unusual thematic relevance:

A man who lived in New York City couldn’t stand it any more. So he moved to Montana. His closest neighbor was ten miles away. The first month was great — he didn’t see anyone. It was quiet. After three months he started to get restless. After six months he was so bored, he thought about moving back to the city. A neighbor called. He invited him to a party. The neighbor said, get ready for a lot of drinking, fighting, and fucking. Great, the man said. Who’ll be there? You and me, the neighbor said.

In American Genius: A Comedy, Tillman brings strands of Elizabeth, Emily, Grace, Jane, and the others into a single consciousness, allowing us unprecedented entry. But do we enter it, or does it entrap us? Not until a hefty chunk of pages has passed does Tillman reveal the name of Helen, the novel’s central character and one who has voluntarily entrapped herself in some sort of colony or low-security institution. Though she rarely roams far from wherever it is she lives, her thoughts spread, soar, and loop — especially loop — through subjects and variations on the industrial technology of textiles, the Zulu language, former Manson acolyte Leslie van Houten, and dermatology — especially dermatology.

Helen: we’ve heard that name before. Could the mind of this middle-aged American History PhD. exiled from the greater social sphere belong to the very same Helen of Cast in Doubt, thirty years on? Or to one of the now very much grown girls of Haunted Houses? Or to the traveler of Motion Sickness, who finally learned a way to stay put and then some? Tillman prevents us from firmly believing or rejecting any or all of those possibilities. I can imagine any of her main characters at home here, wrapped in this oversensitive skin and oversensitive consciousness, reacting in vast paragraphs to this community of disparate eccentrics, ready at any moment to see and build upon the patterns in the seemingly yet deceptively formless play of data, ideas, and recollections that combination sparks.